A SPARKLING EYE
If Martin Munkacsi’s name rings a bell, it’s most likely because Richard Avedon often cited the Hungarian-born photographer (1896-1963) as an early, enduring influence. Beginning in the mid-nineteen-thirties, Munkacsi’s pictures of women running and leaping across the pages of Harper’s Bazaar injected a fresh, brash energy into what had been a staid business. But the irrepressible spirit that Munkacsi brought to fashion had already made him famous as a photojournalist who could arrest action without sapping its excitement, and it’s these images (as well as many taken after he emigrated to the U.S., in 1934) that make his retrospective at I.C.P. so engaging. Although he lived through some of history’s darkest days (and there are photos of massed S.S. troops to prove it), the images that defined his career fairly explode with joie de vivre. Dancers, divers, bathers, models, and an effortlessly antic Fred Astaire—in Munkacsi’s world, half the population finds itself levitating in midair, and the rest looks on in wonder.
